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I doubt that [sites] with a small target market are seriously
effected by search engine positioning. In either of these cases,
consumers are more likely to rely on research, word-of-mouth, past
experience, and/or brand loyalty to make decisions. And in the case
of non-technically literate markets, of course, search engine
position is probably next to irrelevant.

I have to disagree with you here. It is the smaller markets that
benefit most from SEO and search engine position.

You'v taken me out of context. My original comment was:

"SEOs might be useful to those with a relatively inexpensive product
that has a large, technically literate audience. However, I doubt that
expensive goods and services or ones with a small target market are
seriously effected by search engine positioning. "

Since tech-writing falls under the category of "a large, technically
literate audience," it is excluded from my comment.

In my first post on this subject, I recommended SiteSell's description
of SEO. They also have a page (http://results.sitesell.com/lyam.html)
that shows some of their customers' sites having a top-3% Alexa
ranking. Most of these are small-market sites that have never existed
off line and that get all their traffic from SEO. Who would have
thought that www.christian-music-lyric.com, just one example that has
an interest level of zero for me, would, out of a total 16.6 million
sites on the web, have a traffic rank of 231,964, Or that
teatreewonders.com could possibly have an Alexa rank of 93,841? One
can only conclude that these small-market sites are doing something
right, and that something is SEO.

All very well, but what I would want to know is not how many hits a site
has, but the before and after sales that result. This is a subject that
SEO experts tend not to talk about. I haven't seen any statistics on the
subject, but my common sense guess is that results vary considerably
with the product and the market audience.

Those of us who work in high-tech have a tendency to think that everyone
else thinks the same way that we do, but there's many a dot-com to prove
otherwise.

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